Selkie

by Jen Larsen

Another new cabalist joins us today, Jen Larsen, whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Flytrap, and Nimrod International Journal, among other places. Fittingly enough, her first story at the cabal begins with a beginning…

When I was born, my mother tore me open from neck to gut and peeled my  skin away. My slick and bloody pelt hung from her fingers, and I was  left pink and screaming raw. I was born a seal, and she stripped that  from me. My father, in the next room, waited and paced. Terrified. Full of resolve. Or stupid hope.

Survival is a pure and animal instinct.

#

My father had loved God until he saw my mother. On the deck of Staten Island Ferry, he gripped the rails and focused on the pale skin of his knuckles, the iron smell of the sea. My mother’s face broke like a closed fist through the surface of the water. When she opened her eyes he thought, blacker than the waves. She rested a small white hand on the hull and looked at him with a smile that stripped him bare. She knew all the terrible things he had ever thought, and ever would. His heart broke because she wasn’t real. His heart broke because she was more real than anything he had believed in.

#

My mother smoothed my pelt down over her knees, and settled me in her arms. Salt water and blood dripped through the bedclothes, and the iron smell of the sea. She called to my father, her voice like the riptide, and he was helpless.

I looked like him. Shock of ginger hair and a knob of a nose. I made tiny fists like he did when he stood in front of his congregation, spread out as far as the horizon, dipping back over the curve of the earth, their faces as remote as the bottom of the ocean. I was quiet in my mother’s arms, so pink and so new. A lighthouse flare of desperate hope. He still believed in Original Sin. He still believed.

My mother said, “Come closer.” She smiled at him with sharp white teeth.

He took a step, and another. He came close enough to touch me. He put out a delicate finger to brush along the arch of my eyebrow. And when I opened my eyes he saw that they were as black as the space around the navigable stars, and he was lost.